5/12/2020 How Can I Get a List of the ODBC Drivers that are Installed on a Computer?

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How Can I Get a List of the ODBC Drivers that are

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July 7th, 2005

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Hey, Scripting Guy! How can I get a list of the ODBC drivers that are installed on a
computer?

— VV

Script Center
Hey, VV. This is one of those questions that end up driving us crazy. That’s because
it: a) seems so simple and, b) appears as though there are a number of ways to get this
information. For example, on our Windows XP computer we have no fewer than eight
WMI classes than include the acronymn ODBC somewhere in the class name. Surely one
of those classes will return a list of installed drivers, right?

Wrong. What we’re trying to get at is the information found on the Drivers tab of the
ODBC Data Source Administrator dialog box:

ODBC Drivers

But none of the WMI classes seem to return that information, at least not directly. (There
might be a convoluted way of getting at this information, but we Scripting Guys try to
avoid convoluted ways whenever possible.) All hope seemed lost, but then one of the
Scripting Guys decided to apply the Upstairs Closet theory to the problem. In this
particular Scripting Home, any time something is lost you can almost bet that it will be
found in the upstairs closet, even though the item should have never been thrown into
the closet and even though everyone in the house solemnly swears that they didn’t put
it there.

Note. Befitting his status as father, this Scripting Guy used to say sarcastically, “Well, it
didn’t just walk there itself, did it?” Now, 11 years later, he’s beginning to think that
maybe these lost items do just walk there themselves.

The registry, as you doubtless know, is the upstairs closet of the operating system: if
you’re willing to look, you can find almost anything in the registry. And, sure enough,
that’s where we found the list of installed ODBC drivers, in
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\ODBC\ODBCINST.INI\ODBC Drivers. (Oddly
enough, we also found a pair of shoes, that jacket that we always liked, and a hacksaw
that disappeared 5 or 6 years ago.)

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5/12/2020 How Can I Get a List of the ODBC Drivers that are Installed on a Computer? | Scripting Blog

As soon as we knew we could get this information out of the registry it was easy to
write a script that retrieved a list of all the installed ODBC drivers:

Const HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE = &H80000002

strComputer = “.”

Set objRegistry = GetObject(“winmgmts:\\” & strComputer &

“\root\default:StdRegProv”)

strKeyPath = “SOFTWARE\ODBC\ODBCINST.INI\ODBC Drivers”

objRegistry.EnumValues HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE, strKeyPath, arrValueNames,

arrValueTypes

For i = 0 to UBound(arrValueNames)

strValueName = arrValueNames(i)

objRegistry.GetStringValue
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE,strKeyPath,strValueName,strValue

Wscript.Echo arrValueNames(i) & ” — ” & strValue

Next

We begin by defining a constant named HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE and setting the value

to &H80000002; we’ll use this constant to indicate that we want to work with the
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE registry hive. We connect to the WMI service and to the
standard registry provider (root\default:StdRegProv), then use this line of code to assign
the registry path within HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE to the variable strKeyPath:

strKeyPath = “SOFTWARE\ODBC\ODBCINST.INI\ODBC Drivers”

As it turns out, the installed ODBC drivers are stored as individual registry values within
this registry key, something like this:

ODBC Drivers

Therefore, to retrieve a collection of all these registry values we need to call the
EnumValues method, a method which automatically grabs all the values within a
specified key:

objRegistry.EnumValues HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE, strKeyPath, arrValueNames,

arrValueTypes

When we call EnumValues we need to supply two in parameters and two out
parameters. “In parameters” are values we supply to the method; in this script we pass
the constant HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE and the variable strKeyPath. Taken together, these
parameters tell the script which registry key we’re working with.

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5/12/2020 How Can I Get a List of the ODBC Drivers that are Installed on a Computer? | Scripting Blog

“Out parameters” represent information that the method provides to us. To get this
information all we have to do is provide a pair of variable names. In our script, the
variable arrValueNames will end up holding an array of all the registry value names
found in SOFTWARE\ODBC\ODBCINST.INI\ODBC Drivers; the variable arrValueTypes will
hold an array of data types for each of these registry values. (We’re including this
particular parameter only because it’s required. Because all our registry values have the
same data type – REG_SZ – we don’t need to worry about data types and thus won’t use
arrValueTypes.)

After calling EnumValues all the individual registry value names will be stored (as an
array) in the variable arrValueNames. To access those values we need to set up a For-
Next loop that runs from 0 to the last item (the upper bound or UBound) in the array.
(As you know, in VBScript the first item in an array is always item 0.) That’s what this line
of code does:

For i = 0 to UBound(arrValueNames)

Inside the loop, we assign the name of the first registry value to a variable named
strValueName:

strValueName = arrValueNames(i)

We do that because, at the moment, all we have are the names of the individual registry
values. To actually get the values that have been assigned to those registry entries we
need to call the GetStringValue method, something we do here:

objRegistry.GetStringValue HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE,strKeyPath,strValueName,strValue

As you can see, we pass GetStringValue four parameters:

•
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE, representing the registry hive.

•
strKeyPath, the registry path within HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE.

•
strValueName, representing the individual registry value.

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5/12/2020 How Can I Get a List of the ODBC Drivers that are Installed on a Computer? | Scripting Blog

•
strValue, an out parameter which will store the value of the registry
entry.

After that we can simply use this line of code to echo back the name of the registry
value and the value assigned to it:

Wscript.Echo arrValueNames(i) & ” — ” & strValue

And when we run the script, we’ll get back output similar to this:

SQL Server — Installed

Microsoft Access Driver (*.mdb) — Installed

Microsoft Text Driver (*.txt; *.csv) — Installed

Microsoft Excel Driver (*.xls) — Installed

Microsoft dBase Driver (*.dbf) — Installed

Microsoft Paradox Driver (*.db ) – Installed

Might not have been as straightforward as we would have liked but you know what they
say: a list of installed ODBC drivers is a list of installed ODBC drivers. (We’re not sure
why they say that, but at least in this case it makes some sense.)

Follow 

Posted in Scripting Tagged databases, ODBC, registry, Scripting Guy!, VBScript, WMI

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